Biologists in Japan have a developed an innovative scanning technique that makes tissues and vital organs transparent, allowing them to track cancer as it spreads throughout the bodies and brains of mice.

The license plate reader (LPR) cameras installed in most cities allow police to track cars and their drivers who are potentially engaged in criminal activities. But depending on the way police store the data, as Ars Technica found out,anyone might be able to access this information.

3D printing can make an action figure copy of your body and face, but the hair usually ends up looking like a Lego minifig wig. The mad scientists at Disney Research just solved that, with an algorithm so powerful it can trace your hair's shape and color with ultra-realism.

Matthew Shaw and William Trossell, the London-based duo known as ScanLAB Projects, continue to push the envelope of laser-scanning technology, producing visually stunning and conceptually intricate work that falls somewhere between art and practical surveying.

Sketching, jotting, or doodling in a paper notebook is one of life's simple joys, but more often than not we end up just tucking those notebooks away and never looking at them again. Mod Notebooks wants to change that, with a setup that digitizes your dead tree designs.

Three-dimensional scanners are one of the newest and most futuristic gadgets in a police investigator's toolkit. These magical, handheld little devices can create 3D models of a crime scene in mere minutes. And the technology just keeps getting better.

Documenting a crime scene well is super important. Once it gets reopened to the public, there's no going back. You can take all the pictures you want, and they might not cut it, but the Roswell Police have a new future-cop style trick: scanning the whole dang place.

It looks like the days of shampoo bottles striking fear into the hearts of airport security everywhere might be numbered. Thanks to Los Alamos scientists, a new type of detection technology could give airports the tools they need to finally tell if a liquid is a potential threat—all with one simple scan.

You can run into some weird dudes on the subway, but for the most part it's a pretty normal experience. That is, unless you record it with a digital scanner; then it turns into a glitched-out digital funhouse. On acid.

There's a lot of lore about what we see in mirrors, or what happens if we go through the looking glass. And this vaguely sinister app offers some control of the situation. Unsigned Mirror is an openFrameworks Windows and Mac app written by the art and technology group Unsigned Long Long. It creates slit-scan craziness…

3D printing is more popular and accessible than ever, and printers are on course to get even cheaper soon. But printing is only one side of the equation; what about taking 3D pictures? There's a convenient, handheld gadget in the works that could do just that, and way cheaper than anything else has before.

Like a bored child who can't be bothered to read, this robot flips from page to page. This odd contraption is actually a new way to scan and digitize the world's books — at a speed of 250 pages per minute. Although it's only a research machine, that reading rate easily beats out manually-fed commercial scanners that…

We generally hear about drone aircraft killing people in war zones. But there's a reverse side to that narrative—an autonomous copter can drop medicine and supplies to people stranded after a natural disaster even when roads have been demolished. A humanitarian group called Ideate recently tested drones' viability…

The newest version of Google Goggles has some nice upgrades—barcode scanning is faster, and it'll recognize and search print ads for you. But, really, the hands-down coolest feature is automatic Sudoku solving. No need to use your brain!

This is not part of Dan Brown's novel. Researcher Silvano Vinceti— chairman of the Italian national committee for cultural heritage—has found a secret code in the Mona Lisa by scanning her eyes. A code that could reveal her mysterious identity:

New research says your ears are like snowflakes—completely unique in the world. Which is neat! But also means you have two giant finger prints on the side of your face, and airport security wants a look.

By the end of 2011, two thirds of U.S. airline passengers will be asked to step through one of 1,000 new Rapiscan X-ray machines. But some scientists are concerned about the unprecedented radiation exposure coming along with them.

There's a saying that a watched pot never boils. You could also say that a watched plant never grows—unless it's being watched by a laser-wielding, 3D plastic sculpture-printing, growth-tracking megarobot.